TEMPLE PLACE 15 



given up and the enclosure became the Public Garden. 

 Out towards Brookline stretched the Mill-Dam, and 

 on the other side of the city "The Neck" led to Rox- 

 bury and also was connected with South Boston by 

 a bridge. The Neck and the Mill-Dam afforded space 

 for long walks for the pedestrians of the time. People 

 walked in those days and were the better for it. 



Between the two divisions of Boston, the conserv- 

 atives and the transcendentalists, Elizabeth Gary 

 passed her youth and like a wholesome plant, drew 

 the best from all these elements. 



The winter life in Temple Plac'e passed under the con- 

 ditions that Miss Gary has described was to a great extent 

 continued for the Gary household during the summer, which 

 they always spent at Nahant. Here they occupied a stone 

 cottage built by Colonel Perkins not long after the mar- 

 riage of Mrs. Gary and said to have been the first house in 

 the place built by a Bostonian, for Nahant had not yet 

 won the name of "cold roast Boston," bestowed upon it 

 later by a famous wag, and was little more than a 

 resort for fishing and bathing parties. Here Mrs. Agassiz 

 spent her summers with few exceptions from her earliest 

 years until 1904, and Nahant never knew a rival in her af- 

 fections. Her life there was gay and happy in her girlhood, 

 for the cottage was overflowing with young people and 

 echoing with their music and merriment. "How well I 

 remember in our house at Nahant," Miss Gary writes, "a 

 line of young people tramping abreast round the broad 

 piazza singing glees and catches and all sorts of ditties, 

 their fresh young voices ringing out on the evening air. 

 Or in our plain little parlor with nothing pretty in it but an 



